How the Money Power created Libertarianism and Austrian Economics

You say that Marxism is the very antithesis of capitalism, which is equally sacred to us [The Money Power] It is precisely for this reason that they are direct opposites to one another, that they put into our hands the two poles of this planet and allow us to be its axis. These two contraries, like Bolshevism and ourselves, find their identity in the International.”
Otto Kahn, Investment Banker

William S. Volker (1859-1947) was a wealthy German-Jewish businessman. Dismayed by the rise of Socialism in America, he created the Volker fund to provide a reactionary ideology based on “laissez-faire” and Social Darwinism. This was to become Libertarianism.

Libertarianism and its twin sister Austrian Economics were invented by the Money Power to be the other side of the dialectic with Communism.

According to this amazing report, all non-specified quotes in this essay are taken from it, “Volker was no great scholar or thinker. The ideology he set out to create was built upside down, starting only with a set of foggy conclusions for which he had a predisposition. From these conclusions, it was the task of Volker’s considerable fortune to find a set of justifications, then an enabling ideology or “theory” that gave it all perspective and unity and, eventually, a true philosophical platform from which to launch the whole.”

Even though Volker was not an economist of philosopher he had money and, very important, influential relations with the University of Chicago, founded by John D. Rockefeller.

This turned out to be a crucial connection.

Volker’s nephew Harold Luhnow took over the Fund in 1944.

Friedrich Hayek’s ‘the road to Serfdom’ was published the same year. With its defense of ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism and claim that any attempt at regulation would inevitably lead to totalitarianism, it was exactly what the Volker Fund had been looking for. It was only then that the Volker fund started to have a real impact. It arranged for a reprint of Hayek’s book with the University of Chicago and made sure the book ended up in every library in the United States.

The Volker Fund would finance all the leading Austrian Economists and would have a substantial impact on the ‘Chicago School of Economics’, including Milton Friedman.

Von Mises, who throughout his career never held a payed job at any University, was maintained first by David Rockefeller and then for decades received money from the Volker fund and related business men, like Lawrence Fertig.
Von Mises’ biographer, Richard M. Ebeling:
“Many readers may be surprised to learn the extent to which the Graduate Institute and then Mises himself in the years immediately after he came to United States were kept afloat financially through generous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. In fact, for the first years of Mises’s life in the United States, before his appointment as a visiting professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration at New York University (NYU) in 1945, he was almost totally dependent on annual research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.”

David Rockefeller himself was quoted as saying: “Finally, in his most surprising statement, he revealed he considers himself a follower of the Austrian school of economics. Friedrich Hayek had been his tutor at the London School of Economics in the 1930s.“

Rothbard too was financed by the Volker Fund:
“Rothbard began his consulting work for the Volker Fund in 1951. This relationship lasted until 1962, when the VF was dissolved. A major part of Rothbard’s work for the VF consisted of reading and evaluating books, journal articles, and other materials. On the basis of written reports by Rothbard and another reader – Rose Wilder Lane – the VF’s directors would decide whether to undertake massive distribution of particular works to public libraries.

Rothbard later called his work with the Volker Fund, “the best job I’ve ever had in my life.”

The Volker Fund also explored a tactic that was to find wider application later: it spawned an enormous number of organizations, loosely organized to suggest mutual independence and a ‘Libertarian Movement’. Among these was the Foundation for Economic Education, which in turn would create the Mont Pelerin Society.

The Mont Pelerin SocietyThe Mont Pelerin Society was named after the Swiss Alp where the first conference was held. It was founded by Hayek with the financial support of the Volker fund, which payed for the expenses of all American participants. Key co-founders were von Mises, Milton Friedman and Karl Popper.

No less than eight Noble prizes for Economics were to be won by Mont Pelerin members in the decades ahead. Not bad, for a ‘fringe movement, ignored by the Mainstream’.

The Mont Pelerin, in turn, oversaw the creation of many influential institutions. One of them was the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, 1955. This organization reinvented the Conservative Party, of which Margeret Thatcher was to say: “You created the atmosphere which made our victory possible… May I say how thankful we are to those who joined your great endeavor. They were the few, but they were right, and they saved Britain.“

The Heritage Foundation was also a result of the Mont Pelerin Society, as were the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which in turn birthed a plethora of think tanks, including the Fraser Institute.

The amount of money that was invested in all this was tremendous:“John Blundell, the head of the IEA, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, and Atlas in 1990, would identify a rare failure in the Society’s efforts. Shaking his head at the abortive attempt to subsidize academic “Chairs of Free Enterprise” in dozens of countries throughout the world, Blundell complained about wasting, “hundreds of millions, perhaps one billion dollars”. This was just one initiative among many.”

The Koch Family.
The Volker fund was disbanded in 1962. It still had $7 million in assets, which it donated to the Hoover society.

Fred Koch founded the John Birch Society in 1958. Ed Griffin was educated there. He later wrote a famous book, “the Creature of Jekyll Island”. This was a rehash of Eustace Mullins’ brilliant ‘Secrets of the Federal Reserve’, with one exception: it left out all Mullins’ analysis of the Gold Standard as a Banker operation and how Britain’s demand for taxes payed in Gold were the cause of the war of Independence. Instead it called for the reinstatement of a Gold Standard. This is a key part of the story how Austrian Economics managed to take over the ‘Truth Movement’.

Koch’s son Charles Koch founded the CATO Institute, together with Murray Rothbard. The CATO Institute remains to this day a leading Libertarian outlet.

Libertarianism as a Jewish Movement
Most Leading Libertarians are or were Jewish. Von Mises, Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Irwin (and Peter) Schiff. According to Peter Schiff, his grandfather Jacob Schiff is not the same as the infamous financier.

Rothbard himself had interesting views about race and inequality in the free market: “Rothbard was proud to be a ‘racialist’ because racialism exposed the true source of inequality in a free market, namely genetics. A belief in biological racial inequality was, for Rothbard, part of the libertarian project, because racial inequality was simply how markets reflected nature. Moreover, this was no sudden conversion: Rothbard promoted the same view, as early as 1973, here.”

So Jewish Supremacism can be retraced directly to the Austrian Economics’ main proponent himself.

Conclusion
Libertarianism and Austrian Economics are not the products of maverick free thinkers. On the contrary, all leading proponents of the movement were highly connected individuals. In the early years the Volker Fund made available vast sums of money, because Austrian Economics was considered the right answer to communism, to maintain the dialectic the Money Power needs (also see: ‘Banker explained ‘Occupy America’ Scam‘).

Far from a fringe movement, Mont Pelerin Alumni collected no less than eight Noble Prizes. Alan Greenspan testified of its pervasive influence by saying in 2000:
“the Austrian School have reached far into the future from when most of them practiced and have had a profound and, in my judgment, probably an irreversible effect on how most mainstream economists think in this country.“

In this day and age when communism is no longer considered a threat, but with Marxism/Liberalism/Political Correctness a strong force in Western nations, Libertarianism has found a new lease of life as a way co-opting the resistance in the Alternative Media.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

- John Donne (1572-1631), Meditation XVII

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